I don't understand. Don't charging stations have more opportunity to sell snacks (since even at a fast charger, it takes longer than fill a gas car)? Or do you think charging takes so long, the drivers have enough time to wander down the street to the local McBurgers or strip mall?

I'm also not at all sure how much of an issue this really is. Most of the people I know of who own EVs charge at home or at work. The impression I get from them is charging at a remote station is fairly rare and so convenience is just not that big a deal.

Well, yes. Once people start doing that and finding, all things considered, they like the experience better, I guarantee the vendors will take notice.

Of course, it's rare that all things are equal. Customers will have to consider in distance, charge speed, charger reliability, charger compatibility, and many more things along with convenience of payment methods. It may well be that a good charger close by is preferable to a great charger that's far away.

It's kind of like every other market in existence. Customers vote with their wallets, vendors jump to earn those dollars/pounds/euros.

As I wrote, the observation is people increasingly don't carry physical cards, they use electronic versions (e.g. Google Pay and Apple Pay). If you're Tesla and notice this describes a large number of your customers, it makes sense to just skip the credit card reader. Is that a good idea? Beats me, that's something for the vendors and customers to sort out.

Regarding autonegotiate: this is where some sort of interoperability standard really turns out valuable. The computer industry deals with this all the time. Problem is, there's always one dominant vendor who had a proprietary solution (*cough*Apple*cough*Tesla*cough*) which provides a competitive advantage they don't want to surrender. It's not simple to get out of that situation. This is one area where I can reluctantly admit some sort of government-sponsored standardization or forced licensing can help.

I don't have an EV so I'm quite disconnected from the charger market.

Is that typical? That a charger I might want to actually use would be that far away, and there are no alternatives?

This is where free markets shine. As long as there's competition, you the customer are not captive. The higher the barriers to entry, the less incumbent vendors have to care about your wishes.

That's funny. I remember when Americans travelled to Europe, we were strongly advised to bring cash because plastic was not nearly as widely accepted. Of course, this was back in the olden days when "cash" meant Marks, Francs, and Lyra.

Reminiscing aside, I don't see a need for a mandate. If enough people complain, I'm sure charging makers would include credit card readers. They're cheap enough and I'm actually kind of surprised the non-Tesla networks don't already. I think the thinking is that for a number of EVs, Tesla in particular, your smartphone is your key so it's quite reasonable to expect you've got it with you. TBH, what'd I'd prefer over either a phone app or a credit card is that plugging your car in looks up an account and payment method and just handles it (which, I believe, is how my Tesla-owning friends tell me it works).

My one experience with this was renting an EV for a trip to Boston. The car was great, the charging experience was miserable.

They're making the perfect the enemy of the good. People seem to forget (or never have learned) that nicotine isn't the truly harmful part of smoking, it's the actual smoke. Anything you do to encourage people to smoke instead of vape is tragically harmful.

By making the vapor look so much like actual smoke, vape companies aren't helping the situation.

I think that's the point. Used to be only a few countries had the resources to build a global army, ICBMs, and/or nukes. Now we have what, 10 nuclear powers? And building an ICBM is something a billionaire can do in a single factory? The Ukrainians are showing that I can buy a container-load of consumer quad copters, add some grenades produces by the millions, and take out an armor column (yes, yes, I know, it's likely not that effective).

But yes, this could easily be the great democratization of weapons of very-wide-scale, if not mass, destruction.

I stand corrected. Thank you.

(I can't believe the LARP plate held up. I wonder what kind of Colt that was and what was it firing, not that I'm enough of a gun user to appreciate it. The LARPere must have made a point of hardening the steel after forming it, which is a step I would have thought he might have skimped on. Evidently not.)

I remember visiting an armor museum (in Worcester, MA, IIRC) and seeing a suit of armor with a big round dent from a musket ball. I sorta remember as firearms became more prevalent, armor became less so. The exact causality is apparently beyond me.

No matter, I think my larger point stands. As firearms and artillery became widely deployed, the old defenses became obsolete. I expect that 30 years from now, we'll find all sorts of expensive systems becoming less important versus just massive numbers of drones.

I too will believe it when I see it. Until then, I'll assume this is as real as the "Working Polaris Submarine!" you could find advertised in the back of comic books.

That said, the article has a point. As we're seeing in Ukraine and Iraq, drone offense is becoming cheaper and better at a rapid clip. We need to rapidly invent a way to intercept 10,000 drones. Million dollar missiles isn't it, it's probably 30,000 interceptor drones.

This kind of reminds me of the rise and falls of castles. Used to be defense was the tallest, thickest wall you could build. Then relatively inexpensive artillery showed up and could make rubble of any wall, no matter how well built, and castles became obsolete. Same story with armor: ten farmers with muskets can kill a knight in plate no matter how well he fights. I have no doubt military historians will look back and identify this as a transition point when war stopped being waged with million dollar weapons and started being fought with millions of inexpensive drones.

...can stand still faster than you can sprint.

...tells his GPS where it is.

...unscrambled an egg.

And my favorite:
...told his wife to calm down and she did.

Sure. And normally that's handled through zoning laws. From the fine summary, I take it that swaths of Ohio don't have any zoning laws.

(And, IMHO, good for them. I'm not a huge fan of zoning. But I don't live in Ohio so it's none of my business.)

So, and hear me out, perhaps pass some zoning laws first?

Technical question for the nerds in the crowd.

Where exactly does the real-time translation run? I assume part is on the headphones themselves, my guess would be tokenizing the incoming sound. Is there something running on an iPhone (which I assume is a required accessory)? What runs on an AI back end service?

Anyone know the details?

I'm with you in this case. Part of the art is that the artist is anonymous.

As others are writing, he has no legal or moral right to privacy. But I think we live in a better world if we don't out him.

No doubt. And hopefully the Canadian government is less heavy-handed than other governments. I wouldn't assume that's the case but maybe it will be.

What I'm most comfortable with is there being lots of models, created by lots of organizations, funded by a plethora of sources, produced in different societies, and freely (as in speech) available to all humans. That way, if one is too biased, people will ignore it in droves.

That and "national emergency".

I'm hoping the silver lining we'll get out of the debacle of the last ten years is a renewed respect for federalism and separation of powers. I'm not holding my breath. People are stunningly resistant to realizing it won't always be your friends and allies wielding that power you want to hand out. "We can let the President use his judgement, surely he'll use it with restraint and for the good of the entire country; if he errs, how bad can it be?"

Very, very bad, as it turns out.

Ditto. Time was we coded in assembly. Then compilers came out but people didn't trust them. I, for one, would have occasion to review the generated assembly to double check what got generated matched what I thought the C code should do. By the time I was doing this, it was virtually always me misunderstanding C semantics, not a compiler bug.

AI feels like the next iteration. I code in reasonably specific English. I may or may not carefully review the code, depending on how familiar I am with the toolset and whether the result is a toy, a throwaway tool, or production.

I'll give you yesterday's example. I'm working on a REST API which presents telemetry from a brand new hardware device. There's a lot of uncertainty in how the hardware, control software, and my processing work. In the past, if I wanted to understand what's going on, I'd run a bunch of queries and pore over the output by hand, or maybe copy and paste into a spreadsheet, or write a Perl/Python script to analyze the output. Today I get an AI to create a browser browser app (took maybe 20 minutes if you count bug fix iterations) to fetch the data and render it in a chart. Do I know how to write a good React app? Not in the slightest. Do I care, as long as I can see the shape of the resulting curve? Also not in the slightest, this is a throwaway. Does it help me do a better, faster job on my real work product, the REST server? Oh my God yes.